Competitive Pod – Image courtesy of Sam Greenstone
Aloha,
Well, you can sure tell it’s nearing the end of mating season for the Humpbacks. Case in point…on Monday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise we got to spend a lot of time with a very competitive pod of 3 Humpbacks, which, towards the end of the cruise, turned into a very competitive pod of 4 Humpbacks. From our vantage point, we saw lots of heavy breathing, lots of twisting and turning dives, lots of flukes, and lots of jockeying for position. When the whales disappeared underwater between breaths, we’re pretty sure that all those power plays were still going on, and we really wished we could have seen it! We got an opportunity to deploy our hydrophone during this cruise, but we didn’t pick up many sounds at all.
We were seeing breaches as soon as we left the harbor on Monday’s Mid-Morning Cruise. The breachers were out to sea aways but still easy to see. When we got close enough to them to figure out who we were looking at, we realized we were watching Mom with her fairly big calf. These two stayed with us for most of the cruise…not breaching anymore, but surfacing, spouting and sounding. If there was an escort with them, he didn’t make an appearance while we were watching.
We were seeing breaches as soon as we left the harbor on Monday’s Mid-Morning Cruise. The breachers were out to sea aways but still easy to see. When we got close enough to them to figure out who we were looking at, we realized we were watching Mom with her fairly big calf. These two stayed with us for most of the cruise…not breaching anymore, but surfacing, spouting and sounding. If there was an escort with them, he didn’t make an appearance while we were watching.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: What does a Humpback whale drink? We know a Humpback doesn’t sip on ocean water – he can’t because he’s a mammal and the salinity of his tissues is less than that of the ocean (so, like us, if he drank salt water, he’d dehydrate and die). We also know there’s no fresh water to drink from in the ocean. When the whale is feeding, we know he gets liquid from the tissues of the fish he’s digesting…and we know calves get liquid from their mothers’ milk. But how does a Humpback survive through the breeding season when he’s not feeding? It turns out that one of the main by-products of fat metabolism is the production of water. Humpbacks burn a lot of fat during the breeding season and because they are much more efficient users of the water they produce, they can survive. They don’t have tear ducts, sweat glands or salivary glands…and they have incredibly efficient kidneys which concentrate salt in their urine.